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Easy-Bake cooking: the hardest part is opening the door

I spend 10 minutes trying to open the door of the Easy-Bake. Eventually I realize that it’s not a real door, just plastic molded to look like the door of a microwave, painted white and aqua blue. In those 10 minutes I adjust the two dials, thinking that some combination of time and temperature might release the door catch, not realizing that they’re just plastic knobs, unconnected to any circuitry.

The whole time I curse the editor who’d sent me the toy, to test a recipe for this column, for not including the instructions.

I must have seen them advertised 1,000 times as a kid, between commercials for Honeycomb cereal and G.I. Joe toys. If I thought about them at all, it was only to question why it was safe to give children ovens.

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But they’re not ovens. Since the product was launched by Kenner toys in 1963, they’ve been designed to look like miniature ovens. But in most versions, a tin baking pan enters through the side of the toy and is slid through to a chamber heated by a 100-watt bulb. To be fair, their ads have always illustrated this. But when I was 9, commercial breaks in
The Smurfs
were spent thumbing through Dostoyevsky, or writing fan letters to Gloria Steinem, complaining about the role of children’s advertising in the reinforcement of gender stereotypes.

In the toy’s 50-year history, models have reflected oven designs of the times, decorated with flowers and scotch plaid in the early 1970s, adapting to the appearance of microwaves ovens in the late ’70s, always with fake knobs and buttons, plus Betty Crocker cake mixes. The
latest version
, an amorphous blob, isn’t representational of anything. These designs, and the company’s history, are explained in greater detail in Todd Coopee’s book,
Light Bulb Baking: A History of the Easy-Bake Oven
.

Over the last decade, the 100-watt bulb has been phased out, replaced by a heating coil. Though some of my friends have a childhood memory of an Easy-Bake oven with a working door that opened, that’s a manufactured memory. The closest was a 2006 front-loading model, which resulted in hundreds of burnt fingers
and a recall
of nearly one million units.

In 2002, Hasbro (the big fish in the product’s legacy of owners, including Tonka, General Mills and Kenner) failed at courting young males with a “
Queasy-Bake Cookerator
,” decorated with spiders and snakes, with recipes for “bugs n’ worms mix” and “blend-a-booger,” because boys like insects and bodily secretions more than cake and candy.

But the Easy-Bake may be the most likely encounter any modern child has with cooking, outside of television. It’s no longer common for us to live in multi-generational homes, where our grandparents pass on cooking techniques, showing kids how to make dumplings from the old country.

We used to teach children about cooking in public school.

“In 1999, the ministry, in their wisdom, took family studies out of elementary school,” recounts Laura Featherstone, an instructional leader (teacher of teachers) with the Toronto District School Board, “because they said it would be taught in all areas. But it’s not.”

And while the TDSB has a handful of fantastic food programs, such as roof gardens that connect students with what they eat, these are outliers.

There are 18 schools that offer a hospitality and tourism course for Grades 11 and 12, and 54 schools that offer family studies for Grade 10. But the only food education that happens in elementary school is at the discretion of the teacher. “I’d be all over that,” says Featherstone. “We’d like to see more food and food prep.”

We’ve given up teaching children about the interlocking aspects of farming, cooking and nutrition. And we’re starting to feel the results. A food bank operator once showed me a room full of nutritious beets that he couldn’t give away in food baskets, because recipients didn’t know how to cook them. I know people with multiple degrees who can’t make broccoli.

So, if an Easy-Bake oven motivates anyone to start cooking, I’m all for it.

To test mine, I bring in an expert, pastry chef Mary Wood. She’s run the pastry kitchen at
Jamie Kennedy’s
for the last two years. Recently she’s started a small business, Midnight Snacks, supplying food — Korean barbecue chips, pickled quail eggs — for small bars such as Pharmacy or Hole in the Wall.

I feel vindicated when she too spends many minutes trying to open the Easy-Bake’s faux door.

The recipes she gives me for cornbread and pudding chomeur make at least a litre of batter. She never had an Easy-Bake, so she’s equally surprised when only three tablespoons of batter will fit in the little tins. We tested the recipes below in the Easy-Bake (the model I have heats to about 350F/180C) and then again in my grown-up oven. Cooking times and temperatures are provided for both.

Easy Cornbread

2/3 cup (160 mL)
unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup (250 mL)
sugar

3
eggs

1 2/3 cup (410 mL)
milk

2 1/3 cup (580 mL)
all purpose flour

1 cup (250 mL)
cornmeal

4½ tsp (22 mL)
baking powder

1 tsp (5 mL)
salt

Plug in Easy-Bake oven or preheat oven to 400F/200C.

Cube the butter. In a large mixing bowl, use a spatula to cream the butter and sugar.

If using Easy-Bake, cook for 15-20 minutes. Warning: The entrance is smaller than the exit. Once the batter has risen, it will not slide back into the oven. So you can’t check to see if it’s cooked. Once Easy-Bake cornbread is cooked, repeat about 100 times to use up batter.

If using oven, cook until toothpick comes out dry, about 20-25 minutes. Cool before slicing.

Easy Pudding Chomeur

1 cup (250 mL)
unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup (250 mL)
sugar

2
eggs

1¾ cup (430 mL)
all purpose flour

1 tsp (5 mL)
baking powder

2 cups (500 mL)
maple syrup

2 cups (500 mL)
cream

4 tbsp (60 mL)
toasted almonds

Plug in Easy-Bake oven or preheat oven to 425F/220C.

In a large mixing bowl, use spatula to cream butter and sugar. Fold in eggs, flour and baking powder.

If using Easy-Bake, cook for 20 minutes. Once Easy-Bake pudding chomeur is cooked, repeat about 100 times to use up batter.

If using oven, cook until cakelets are set and don’t jiggle, about 20-25 minutes.

Makes 10 servings.

Star-tested by
Corey Mintz
. If you know a great GTA restaurant recipe, tell him and he’ll ask the chef to share it. Email
mintz.corey@gmail.com
and follow @coreymintz on Twitter. His book, How To Host A Dinner Party, is in bookstores.

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